“... approach is to clear space around her subject, to return to the source where she can, and to lay out the versions and parts. It’s as if someone has turned down the music and switched on the lights and now you can hear what everyone’s saying. The two books complement each other.The scenes Nico moved through were managed by men and it is largely men ...”

“... a dull gold ground on the walls of the churches of Saint Germain-des-Prés and Saint Vincent-de-Paul, works in which the Greek and the Gothic are condensed into an exalted style that may one day be acknowledged as more original than the gross realism of Courbet. In these murals, Flandrin had made an artistic decision that was to have enormous ...”

“... fire in the leader column. For good measure, the paper consistently argued that Britain’s future lay inescapably in Europe. These opinions soon brought Hastings into conflict with right-wingers inside and outside the Telegraph. To political columnist T.E. (Peter) Utley, an exponent of mid-19th century Conservatism, he was not a gentleman. (Hastings was ...”

“... Bush’s more bellicose lieutenants saw it, the principal constraints on the use of American power lay within the US government itself. In a speech to Defense Department employees only a day before 9/11, Rumsfeld had warned of ‘an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America’. Who was this adversary? Some ...”

“... heart. The bookshops are small, and open all the time; on Friday there’s a market, when vendors lay out their books in Arabic and English on mats on the dusty and broken surface of the road. Most are second-hand. In the 1990s, after the first Gulf War, I used to walk around the district looking at books, often English classics once owned by ...”

“... rows are just as useful for blocking out other people as intense sex. Lawrence was completing ‘Paul Morel’, the draft for Sons and Lovers, at the time, and his inability to lay his own mother to rest is surely behind some of his more vicious insults. In ‘She Looks Back’, Frieda’s salty tears of ‘horrid ...”

“... Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in Florida, where her father was an ...”

“... 1941 America First rally in Des Moines, maintained that the ‘greatest danger to this country’ lay in Jewish ‘ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government’. In its way, Urwand’s view of Hollywood is just as blinkered. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, set up in the summer of 1936, is referred to only in ...”

“... who first spotted its potential as an organising tool.* You can see why people might want to lay claim to ‘We are the 99 per cent’: it’s a brilliant slogan and an increasingly successful brand, doing its work on T-shirts and banners around the world. But it’s a half-baked idea. The problem is that 99 per cent is far too many. Majorities on that ...”

“... The overlapping vehicles aren’t heading the same way. Woolf, like Eliot (or for that matter like Paul Nash or Stanley Spencer, both brought in as supporting testimony), was by the late 1930s a middle-aged artist with a reputation to live up to, or live down: in each of these acts, a major dynamic had become internal dialogue. Piper by contrast remained as ...”

“... at the horizon. Venus shone a heatless planetary white among these parrot colours, and earth lay unregenerate so long that it seemed to me for once all these blandishments might fail. The birds of our world were black motes in that tropic. ‘It doesn’t seem to get any lighter,’ I said.    ‘It will,’ Lucille replied. The book’s ...”

“... possessed an enormous amount of what today is known as ‘social capital’. And in that lay the source of their eventual collapse; for in their determination to maintain cultural coherence in a foreign environment, they made no attempt to learn from the native inhabitants – the Inuit – about the local ecology and the reasons the latter relied on ...”

“... to the west we could see the ridges of Mt Gràmos, the CDA’s last toehold on Greek soil, where Paul Eluard came to visit their trenches and harangue the imperialist lackeys arrayed against them through a megaphone. They were driven out of their positions by US Helldivers – the first use of napalm in warfare. From where we leave the pick-up you can just ...”

“... to listen to such people.’ Not a very sensible thing for a self-styled elder statesman to say. Paul Scheffer, a left-wing columnist with political ambitions who became famous by taking a very public stance against multiculturalism, grew quite excited when Michael Ignatieff’s name came up in his conversation with Buruma. ‘You and I meet for the first ...”

“... place by chance in Paris, on the afternoon of 28 June 1964. Paz describes it in Viento Entero. In Paul Blackburn’s translation:              The fallen birdbetween rue Montalembert and rue de Bacis a girl              held backat the edge of a precipice of looks. . .A marching battalion of ...”